Art and theater reviews covering Seattle to Olympia, Washington, with other art, literature and personal commentary.
If you want to ask a question about any of the shows reviewed here please email the producing venue (theater or gallery) or email me at alec@alecclayton.com. If you post questions in the comment section the answer might get lost.

A new theater company
premieres its opening season the weekend of August 16 to 19 with the popular
musical Legally Blonde, to be follow
by other hit musicals: The Rocky Horror
Show in October, The Wedding Singer
in February, Young Frankenstein in
March, and Cabaret in May. For the
first season at least, they are sticking to musicals with broad public appeal,
and each show will run one weekend only. But founder and managing director Kyle
Murphy has indicated a willingness to tackle some less sure-fire properties in
future seasons. “We hope to partner and
collaborate with as many local performing organizations as possible, not
limited to musical theater,” he says.

Shows will be performed
in the historical Capitol Theater, where the company has added new lighting
fixtures and taken steps to ensure the best possible audio.

Helping get the new company rolling is an
all-star group of local theater professionals, including Lexi Barnett; Amy
Shepherd; Bruce Haasl; Heidi Fredericks from Apple Tree Productions; and Chris
Serface, artistic director of Tacoma Little Theatre.

“It took me four years to find a creative partner, Lexi, who
shared my vision and had the experience to execute it,” Murphy says.

Barnett says she loves Murphy’s “intention to create opportunities for
the Olympia community — and really that is our focus. We put out an all-call
for anyone to submit resumes and letters of interest to direct, choreograph,
music direct and design for our shows this season. We ended up really getting a
mix of people who hail from Olympia and from other areas of the Pacific
Northwest, which to me is also inspiring. I love the idea of the theater
community in Washington getting to broaden their scope and work with people
from many places.”

“I approached Bruce Haasl about designing and building sets
before I ever spoke to a director. He was the first person I asked to work with
me,” Murphy says. Haasl is known as the longtime designer for the old Capital
Playhouse and has more recently designed sets for Harlequin and Tacoma Musical
Playhouse.

“Amy Shepherd was the first local person to step up and offer to help
and has continued to be one of our strongest connections to the existing
theater community.” Shepherd is the group’s community outreach director and will choreograph Young Frankenstein. “It is one of my favorite musicals,” she says. “I'm really excited about Broadway Olympia, I think that the
more theater Olympia has the better.”

Barnett says, “We
have Chris Serface and Jimmy Shields returning to the area to direct shows for
us. We also have some amazing Olympia natives on our team in people like Bruce
Haasl, Mishka Navarre, and L.M. Attea. We saw the same thing with auditions for
Legally Blonde. We got a lot of great
Olympia talent coming out, and we got some actors who have come out from other
towns as well. We had about 50 actors come out for auditions.

Murphy originally intended to launch with two small-cast shows,
but he credit’s Barnett’s “experience, confidence and council” for the decision
to launch with a full season.

Murphy says Legally Blonde,
the season’s opening show, “has a much deeper message than appears on the
surface.” It is the story of Elle Woods, a supposedly superficial blonde who
becomes a law student at Harvard. Elle will be played by Jessica Furnstahl. Her
arrogant and stuffy boyfriend, Warner Huntington III, will be played by James
Padilla. Molly Quinn will be Elle’s friend, Paulette, a gutsy and streetwise
hairdresser; her friend, Emmett Forrest will be played by Henry Talbot Dorset; and Professor Callahan will
be played by Andrew Fry.

Nicholas Nyland has been showing art around
Tacoma for quite some time, and I thought I was familiar with his work, but the
raw stoneware and terracotta earthenware in his show Reliquary at Feast Art Center offers some things I’ve not seen from
him before. His explosions of primary colors and jagged, chunky forms are
typical of Nyland, but I’ve never seen such forms and colors combined with clay
that has not been glazed. Or, to be more accurate, clay that is glazed only in
strategic areas.

Predominant in the colors he uses are a soft
baby blue combined with dark metallic grays and blues, delicate pink and
lavender in at least one of the wall-hanging pieces, and in a few pieces a
clash of every primary and secondary color on the color wheel. He contrasts these
colors with the natural clay in exciting ways.

There are ceramic works best described as plates
and relief paintings (descriptively, not literally) that hang on the wall, and
there are freestanding ceramic sculptures displayed on tables, and paintings and
drawings on paper and canvas. I think it would be accurate to describe the
three-dimensional works as painterly sculpture or sculptural paintings.Imagining Jasper Johns painting on ceramic
sculptures by Peter Voulkos might give you a mental picture of these works.

The forms are rough, and the colors are bright
and highly contrasting. Many of them have a look that I associate with Mexican
art, primarily because of the colors and the exuberance, which is, of course,
not typical of all Mexican art.

The art is abstract but inspired by the real
world. You might not be able to identify what is depicted, but you might well
sense the presence of architecture or playing cards or animals. The title of
the show, Reliquary, also hints at
what inspired many of the forms. There are solid looking containers that look
like they are made to hold relics, and the decorative surfaces on some of the
wall-hung pieces look like either symbols on shields or coat-of-arms.

In a written statement, Nyland explains, “I’m
particularly interested in bringing antique motifs and elements of craft or
applied art practices into a fine art context.”

One of my favorite pieces looks like a beast of
burden, a burro perhaps, that is wrapped with golden looped chains upon which
have been stuck pendants of many colors. The beast’s head is a color wheel.
What I like about this is that it hints at representing something recognizable
without giving away what it is — more importantly, perhaps, without the meaning
of all the reliquary items being made clear. I get the feeling all the
connected items have deeply held personal meanings, but an element of mystery
remains.

The drawings and
paintings have much the same quality as the sculptural pieces. They look
vaguely like interior scenes, but items in the scenes are not recognizable in
every instance. There are a couple of large works on paper that have as central
figures what looks like a drum sitting in front of a window or door. There is a
distinctive Matisse-like quality to these, but they are sketchier and more
loosely painted. But yes, they do look quickly thrown together, but in an
expressive and exciting way.

Feast has limited gallery hours, so I suggest
planning your visit ahead of time, and by all means make it a priority to see
this show.

Friday, July 20, 2018

Disney’s “Beauty and
the Beast” with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by and Tim Rice and Howard
Ashman is now playing at Tacoma Musical Playhouse. It is a big production with
an elaborate set and lighting, fabulous costumes and a 36-person cast, all of
whom are on stage at once during some of the large production numbers such as
the show stopping “Be Our Guest” with complex choreography by director and
choreographer Jon Douglas Rake.

Set designer Judy
Cullen returns with an amazing set featuring a delightful backdrop painting of
a small French village and a stunningly beautiful castle replete with a broad
staircase and rich blue and purple and gold colors enhanced by lighting director
John Chenault’s shadowy effects.

The costumes by
Jocelyne Fowler are wildly inventive, as they must be for humans turned into
walking and talking clocks and candles and teapots. Belle’s dresses are
luxurious and beautiful, especially a white gown that looks like a layered
wedding cake.

Prince Adam (Brandon
Hell) is turned into a hideous beast by an enchantress (Kathy Kluska). For
years he has hidden his grotesqueness in his castle. His servants are turned
into animated pieces of furniture and household items such as Cosworth the
clock (Chris Serface), Lumiere the candle (Mauro Bozzo) and Mrs. Potts the
teapot (Diane Bozzo). They know the spell can be broken, and everyone will
become human again only if the beast can learn to love and be loved.

Meanwhile, back in the
village, the beautiful Belle (Cherisse Martinelli) is being relentlessly
courted – stalked and harassed by today’s standards – by an arrogant, self-centered
hunter named Gaston (Jimmi Cook) who thinks he is God’s gift to women. Belle’s
father, the eccentric inventor, Maurice (Joe Woodland) is captured and
imprisoned in the beast’s castle. Belle goes to the castle in search of her
father and offers to be the beast’s captive if he will let her father go, which
he does. Instead of being put under lock and key as her father was, she is
given a private room in the castle and asked to dine with the beast. She
resists at first, but gradually she learns to see the humanity underneath the
beast’s outer shell. What this leads to is, of course, what the audience knows
will happen, and it is beautiful and magical and romantic despite being totally
predictable.

Cook, who has the
physique of a body builder, is perfectly cast as Gaston, who spends all his
time with muscle poses when he is not pursuing Belle. Beyond looking the part
so perfectly, he is a good actor and singer.

I like the choice of
Martinelli for the part of Belle because she is befittingly beautiful, not in a
trite fairy-princess sort of way, but with the beauty of a down-to-earth,
sensible and intelligent young woman, which is precisely how Belle is written.
She also has a strong voice.

Hell does a terrific
job of acting, and he has a beautiful deep and mellow voice. My only complaint
is he is not large enough and his costume is not ugly or frightening enough to
be the beast as described (at one point, Maurice says he is eight feet tall).
On the other hand, since it is a play that appeals to children, it is probably
a good thing he isn’t more frightening.

Also deserving of
special note are Bozzo as Mrs. Potts and Karen Early-Evans as Madame de la
Grande Bouche, both of whom sing stupendously.

The only actor I found
to be somewhat disappointing is Woodland as Belle’s father, who should be more
animated. My only other complaint is I wish it could be about half an hour
shorter. It did drag a bit in parts of the second act.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

When reviewing/commenting on the
first draft of my novel Tupelo, Ned
Hayes made reference to Paris Trout
by Pete Dexter. I had read it years before, and I remembered I had been greatly
impressed with it at the time, but I couldn’t remember much about the actual
story or Dexter’s writing style. (One of the great things about getting older
is you can re-read stuff and it’s like you never read it.) So I read Paris Trout again and was astounded at
how good it was. It’s a book that turns Southern Gothic inside out and creates
a whole new genre unlike anything else ever written. The title character is the
strangest and most horrific character I have ever come across in literature. It’s
a cliché to say “I couldn’t put it down.” But if it were not for having to eat
and sleep, I would not have been able to. Paris
Trout is horrifying, hilarious, and compelling.

I mentioned it on Facebook, and my
friend Ned (a great writer in his own right and the person responsible for me
reading it) commented that Dexter is a writer’s writer. Damn right he is.

I loved Paris Trout so much that as soon as I finished reading it I picked
up another Pete Dexter novel, Deadwood.
For the first third or so of Deadwood,
I was slightly disappointed, partly because I could not sense much of a story
arc, and partly because a major character and an American legend, Wild Bill Hickock,
didn’t do much of anything except get drunk, play poker (usually losing) and
shoot things off the head of a dog—a circus-type performance played out
in a bar with an accommodating and trusting dog. But then, starting with a
chapter called China Doll (a Chinese prostitute) it started getting increasingly
more compelling. It’s a true story, and I’ve been told it was meticulously
researched and accurate. The town of Deadwood is beautifully depicted as what
must have been one of the rawest and wildest towns in American history, and
some of the characters such as Calamity Jane and an unnamed “soft brain bottle fiend”
should stick in my mind for as long as I live—in direct contradiction to my
earlier statements about not remembering well.

And again, as soon as I finished
that one, I started another Dexter novel, Spooner.
I’ve barely started it, but already I am floored with Dexter’s writing, the
uniqueness of his characters and how skillfully he weaves together the elements
of a story. If I were a writing teacher, I would use Dexter as an object lesson
in the art of writing. I would talk about how well he uses similes that are creative
and the result of careful observation and memory. For example, in Spooner he describes a profound and
sudden silence as being like when you dive into water and the moment you go
under all sound ceases. When I read that I immediately recalled when I was a
teenager diving off the high board at the swimming pool in Tupelo, the sounds
of all the kids shouting and splashing and laughing melded together as a kind
of symphony as I descended toward the water and became utter silence once my
ears were under water. I had not thought of that in half a century, but Dexter
brought it back to me in such a way that I didn’t just understand the silence
his character experienced, I heard it.

If I were teaching Dexter, I would talk
about the opening paragraph of Spooner.
It is two sentences long; the first sentence is convoluted and poetic and
packed with information. It is followed by a short, bare-boned sentence that
hits with the force of an ax chopping wood. The next paragraph follows the same
kind of pattern, so by the time you have read these first two paragraphs you
are hooked, and you are dying to know about the boy named Spooner who has just
been born. That’s good writing. If you’re looking for books to sink your teeth
into this summer, give Dexter a try.

Friday, July 6, 2018

"A Work in Progress"by Mary Preston, courtesy University of Puget Sound

Book
artists, meaning artists who create books conceived as works of art, combine
many of the most fascinating elements of books — stories told with words and
sometimes illustrated with pictures — and elements of visual arts such as
drawn, painted and sculpted images. When these elements are skillfully woven
together, the results can the magical.

The Puget Sound Book Artists Eighth Annual
Members’ Exhibition at
Collins Library, University of Puget Sound offers 57 unique and original
books by 36 different artists displayed in a dozen glass cases in the library.
There are folding books, books in boxes, books that are stand-alone sculptures,
accordion sheets of paper and cloth and other materials with drawn, painted,
sewn and sculpted images and decorations, and elaborate pop-up books. Many of
the books look as if the pages are meant to be opened, and I wish they could be
opened to see what, if anything, is on the hidden pages; but they can’t be
touched.

Some of the
books tell stories with words and images, whether fiction or non-fiction. Some
only hint at stories and thereby stir the viewer’s imagination, and some are
purely decorative or abstract with no attempt at storytelling.

The
complexity of these works of art and the patience, skill and inventiveness of
the artists who create them are truly impressive.

“The Puget Sound Book Artists have a
following and now an excellent reputation in the South Sound and beyond,” said
Jane Carlin, director of Collins Memorial Library and vice president of the
organization. “It is truly an honor to host this exhibit and each year. I am
astonished at the creative and inspiring art on display.”

Jan Dove’s “The Horseman” captured the
Curator’s Choice award. It is an accordion-fold book with illustrations of
horses and people in sensitive line drawings over fields of color. There are a
few lines of poetry that talk about hearing approaching hoofbeats and the line
“Let’s hope it’s not those four horsemen,” indicating, as I interpret it, the
four horsemen of the Apocalypse.Stylistically, the drawings harken back to Roman art.

A work that is similar in that it features
staccato line drawings over other images is Bonnie Halfpenny’s “With a Compass,
Without a Map.” It is also an accordion-fold book. The first page features
written text that briefly tells the stories of four accomplished women in the
post-Civil War era. Drawings of each of the women are created in black thread
over collaged images. The materials are tule, paints, thread and more. The
craftsmanship is admirable, as are the women whose stories are depicted. I
would like to find out more about them.

One of my favorite books is Sandy Tilcock’s
“Opening the Mouths of the Dead,” a two-sided accordion in a clamshell box with
images in intaglio, letterpress and hand painting. It illustrates the story of
a third-grade girl in North Carolina in the 1960s who used the Egyptian Book of
the Dead to “navigate her complicated relationship with her father.” This one
is a clear example of what I was thinking of when I said book art combines
elements of books and art. There is history, drama and beauty galore in this
show.

There will be a panel Discussion Thursday, July 12, from 5:30- 7:30 p.m. in the Archives Seminar Room, second floor.

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About Me

I am an artist and writer living in Olympia, Washington. I write an art review column, a theater review column and arts features for the Weekly Volcano, a community theater review column for The (Tacoma) News Tribune and regular arts features for OLY ARTS (Olympia).
My published novels are: This Is Me, Debbi, David; Tupelo; The Freedom Trilogy (a three-book series consisting of The Backside of Nowhere, Return to Freedom and Visual Liberties); Reunion at the Wetside; The Wives of Marty Winters; Imprudent Zeal and Until the Dawn. I've also published a book on art, As If Art Matters. All are available on amazon.com.
I grew up in Tupelo and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and have been living in the Pacific Northwest since 1988 where I am active in many progressive organizations such as PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).